The amount to have invested now to coast to retirement.
Coast FIRE number
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Full FIRE number
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Surplus or shortfall
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Your breakdown
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The milestone where you can stop saving for retirement
Coast FIRE is a gentler cousin of full financial independence. It is the point at which the money you already hold will, left untouched, grow into your complete retirement target by the time you retire, even if you never invest another rupee toward retirement. You still go to work and still cover your day-to-day expenses from your salary, but the retirement portion is on autopilot. This appeals to people in Pakistan who do not want to retire decades early but would dearly like to lift the pressure of compulsory monthly investing once their corpus is large enough to coast. The calculator finds that coast number for your age, your retirement age, and your expected return.
Two steps: size the finish line, then discount it to today
The math runs in two moves. First it builds your full FIRE number by dividing your expected annual retirement expenses by your withdrawal rate; a 4% withdrawal rate means you need 25 times your annual spending. Then it discounts that future target back to today at your expected return, which gives the smaller sum you need invested right now to coast there. The withdrawal rate is the assumption that sets the size of the finish line, and the 4% default is a widely used planning rule rather than a Pakistani legal standard. Returns are not guaranteed and inflation in Pakistan can be high, so treat every percentage here as a planning input you can stress-test, not a promise.
A 32 year old aiming to coast to 60
Take the defaults. You are 32, want to retire at 60, expect PKR 2,400,000 of annual expenses in retirement, plan on a 4% withdrawal rate, and assume an 11% return. The full target is PKR 60 million, and discounting it across 28 years gives the coast number.
With PKR 4 million already invested, you are past the coast line. The chart shows that PKR 3.23 million quietly compounding at 11% all the way to the PKR 60 million target, no further saving required.
How violently the answer swings with the return you assume
The coast number is a discounted figure, which makes it extraordinarily sensitive to the return assumption. That same PKR 60 million target needs only about PKR 3.23 million today at 11%, but drop the return to 8% and the coast number swells to roughly PKR 6.9 million, because slower growth has to start from a much larger base. Push the assumed return higher and the number shrinks dramatically. This is the most important thing to understand about Coast FIRE: a single optimistic percentage point can make you believe you have coasted when a more sober return would say you are years away. Run the calculator twice, once with an assumption you would defend to a skeptic, before you act on the result.
What the tool quietly leaves out, and who it suits
Two honest caveats. The expenses you enter are assumed to be in retirement-era rupees, so if you plug in today's spending without inflating it, the target will understate what you will actually need decades from now in a high-inflation economy. And Coast FIRE says nothing about how you fund life between now and retirement; you still need income to cover current costs, it only releases you from saving more for old age. This tool is for the mid-career professional who has built a respectable corpus early and wants to know whether the retirement piece is handled, freeing income for a home, a business, or simply breathing room. It is less useful for someone just starting out, who is better served by the full FIRE number and a steady contribution plan.
How is Coast FIRE different from being fully FIRE?
Full FIRE means your invested pot is already large enough to live off right now, so you could stop working today. Coast FIRE is earlier and looser: your pot is not big enough to retire on yet, but it is big enough that it will grow into a full retirement fund on its own by your target age. With Coast FIRE you keep earning to pay current bills; you have simply switched off the obligation to save for retirement.
Does Coast FIRE account for an EOBI or company pension?
Not directly; the calculator works purely off your invested savings. If you expect an EOBI pension or a provident fund payout in retirement, that income reduces how much your own corpus must cover, which lowers both your FIRE number and your coast number. A practical approach is to subtract any reliable pension income from your annual expenses before entering them, so the target reflects only the gap your investments must fill.